Spending money to save moneyhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/spending-money-to-save-money
Centralization and outsourcing fail the Forest Service againSay you're a struggling Western freelance writer. In a quest for some dependable cash, you apply to work on trail crew for a summer with the Forest Service -- a great way to be in the mountains and make money. You call up the local USFS office and get assurance that yes, you're qualified, and they'd like to hire you, but you need to apply through the standardized application system.

You wade through a tedious online application process and wait to hear back. And wait. And wait. Summer approaches and you need work, so you get a coffee shop gig instead. A year later, you decide to apply once more for trail crew. After spending 30 minutes tracking down your password (a required eight characters with uppercase characters, a number, and a symbol), you log back in to the hiring site. Once there, you stumble upon a note attached to your old application informing you that, according to the computer system that sorts applications, you are deemed unqualified for trail crew -- even though folks on the ground were ready to hire you. You were never notified, though. Surprised and frustrated, you shrug. What can you expect? It's the government -- inefficient and nonsensical.

Except it isn't the government. The system that arbitrarily disqualified you, deeming you unsuited to remove deadfall and construct erosion barriers, belongs to a private contractor. Welcome to Avue.

Avue contracts with the government for a variety of digital services. In anticipation of budget cuts, they put out this announcement.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Forest Service, caught up in the Bush-era mandates to centralize and outsource operations to save money, contracted with Avue to manage its hiring. This meant that applicants had to use Avue's system to apply, and those doing the hiring had to trust its automated screening to sort applicants into "qualified" and "unqualified." The problem: A lot of the time, the system didn't work, say Forest Service employees.

These difficulties help explain why a big cheer went up late last year, ($34 million dollars later) when the agency decided not to renew its Avue Digital Services contract. "HALLELUJAH!!!!!" wrote a user on the online forum WildlandFire.com, hearing of the switch. "To be honest, if we were required to use a 1972 typewriter and mail the application on one of those Wells Fargo stagecoaches, that would be better than AVUE. Anything would be better than AVUE."

Yet the switch comes with its own set of costly hassles -- and questions about the value of government outsourcing meant to save money. While the Forest Service won't comment on the decision to switch to eRecruit, a service offered by an Australian company NGA.net, or on its dealings with Avue, employees within the agency currently aren't able to access any data from Avue, including thousands of job descriptions it needs to populate the new system. (Known as position descriptions, or PDs, these are key for matching applicants with jobs.) And not only are are Forest Service employees unable to access old data. If they have downloaded copies of position descriptions from Avue, they aren't allowed to use those either. An agency memo lays it out:

"In no event … can you use a PD (position description) from the Avue system, in whole or in part, to create a new or modified PD in the new eRecruit system." The Forest Service is also in ongoing negotiations with Avue about accessing that old data, but won't comment on that either.

Linda Rix, CEO of Avue Digital Services, says the focus on the missing position descriptions misses the point, though. She says eRecruit isn't able to do many of the complex tasks that Avue did, and that is partly why the transition has been difficult. "What eRecruit is doing for the Forest Service is about 40 percent of what we were doing for the Forest Service."

And despite the difficulties of using Avue, its complexity had a purpose, she adds. When the Forest Service contracted with Avue, says Rix, it was at pains to implement a system where "you can definitely show that you are not practicing discriminatory hiring." Avue's system does this, she says, because it "auto-calculates" matches based on specific job and legal criteria like the Fair Labor Standards Act, matching people -- regardless of race or gender -- based on the position needs and their own skill set. The new system, says Rix, lacks these capabilities.

Forest Service employees might argue that the auto-calculation was precisely what they wanted to get rid of. Avue's automated application screening process, according to a 2011 GAO report, "frequently result(ed) in situations where highly qualified candidates were wrongly eliminated from consideration or unqualified candidates were listed along with qualified candidates." Employees, particularly those in the wildfire program, complained about these baseless disqualifications as well as the overall difficulty of the application process.

Admittedly, it's not easy to be a giant federal agency, with thousands of applications for seasonal openings needing to be evaluated every year. Yet, by 2013, one would hope that the U.S. Forest Service would have figured it out. The Bureau of Land Management, NOAA and a number of other agencies use jobs giant Monster.com, but instead of joining that system, the Forest Service's jump to eRecruit is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's overall shift to a comprehensive human resources management program called "OneUSA," which aims to provide a simpler way for the whole Agriculture Department to hire qualified candidates.

We'll see. I'm just glad I'm not looking to join a trail crew this summer.

Stephanie Paige Ogburn was the online editor at High Country News. She recently moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a climate science reporter. Reach her on Twitter @spogburn.

]]>No publisherPoliticsBlog Post2013/02/18 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGrowing our gashttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/growing-our-gas
The renewable fuel standard has potential, but the omission of algae is a big holeHow cool would it be if we could turn wood trimmings, straw, or other common plant products into gasoline? It's possible -- the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol has been proven, but scaling it up commercially hasn't happened yet, in large part because we haven't figured out how to create large quantities of the stuff cheaply.

Miscanthus is a grass native to subtropical and tropical areas of Africa and southern Asia and could be important in the production in cellulosic ethanol.Image from the Power Plant Garden at the National Arboretum, courtesy USDA.

That's where a relatively little-known federal program, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, comes in. Called the Renewable Fuel Standard, this program may finally make cellulosic ethanol and other, more advanced alternative fuels a commercial reality.

Under the renewable standard, which began in 2006, the EPA creates targets for alternative fuel production that the fuel industry -- fuel blenders, fuel importers, and large refiners, a group that includes giants like Chevron, B.P. and ConocoPhillips-- have to meet. Industry usually meets this obligation by letting ethanol or biodiesel companies produce the renewable fuel. They then buy the credits for that alternative fuel (and sometimes the fuel itself) from those companies.

The fuel industry's (required) demand for renewable fuel credits has thus kick-started many alternative fuel producers, while also serving to reduce our production of climate changing gases. (It's worth noting that it has also allowed agribusiness giants to make a killing in the ethanol game.)

While at first the Renewable Fuel Standard was focused largely on corn ethanol, which is controversial since it props up the already-profitable corn sector and doesn't do much to cut greenhouse gases, the policy was designed to become increasingly more progressive, boosting the production of more advanced fuel alternatives as time goes on.

For example, on Thursday the EPA announced (PDF) it would require the nation to use 14 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2013. Cellulosic ethanol, according to agency calculations, produces 60 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional fuels. (The EPA estimates that corn ethanol produces 20 percent fewer.) The agency also bumped up its biodiesel (which has half the greenhouse gas emissions of standard fuel) requirement from a billion to 1.28 billion gallons. While the quantities of cellulosic fuel and biodiesel are growing, corn ethanol still gets the lion's share of the gallon requirement; in its Thursday announcement EPA said it will require 16.55 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year. Over time, though, the standard ratchets the required quantities of cellulosic and biodiesel ever higher, while corn ethanol levels out. By 2022, 21 billion gallons of fuel produced must qualify as "advanced" biofuels, which means they have to reduce emissions by at least 50 percent.

The increased cellulosic requirements did not come without their share of controversy. Last year, the EPA, suffering from a massive case of wishful thinking, set a cellulosic ethanol standard of 8.65 million gallons. Only 500,000 gallons were produced. Petroleum companies, (who dislike the renewable standard anyway and frequently try to get it repealed in Congress) unable to purchase the targeted amount of cellulosic ethanol, sued the EPA -- and won on that point, with the court saying the EPA standards did not realistically reflect the available supply. This year, however, a number of new cellulosic operations will come online, and the agency, as well as the renewables industry, believes its cellulosic standards will be met.

One glaring omission in the Renewable Fuels Standard is a requirement for an algae-based biofuel. Fuel from algae was not written into the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which updated the standard to include biodiesel. Algae producers, who want the business boost that comes with government renewables requirements, have lobbied for the law to mandate requirements for algal biofuels. Their point is fair -- the standard, by requiring certain types of fuels and not others, effectively picks winners in the renewable energy game. Algae, which has a lot of potential as an alternative fuel, is currently missing out on the kick-start the program has given both the ethanol and the biodiesel industries.

Yet opening up the law for amendments comes with other problems, says Timothy Slating, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies the renewable standard.

"The fear from the biofuels industry is that if any changes are made, there are probably more changes that will be made that they do not like."

Some of those worries include reducing the targeted quantities of alternative fuels, loosening of the standard to include liquefied natural gas, and upping the corn ethanol percentage allowed.

That the Renewable Fuel Standard, which has huge potential for greenhouse gas reductions (transportation makes up 29 percent of our total carbon emissions seems like this should be much earlier), even became a reality was because of an unusual constellation of factors. In 2005 and 2007, when the laws setting it up were passed, a surplus of corn meant that producers were trying to find a new market -- this accounts for the standard's early reliance on corn ethanol. Climate change had not yet become the polarizing issue it is today, and the twin prospects of energy independence and job creation made the bill attractive to a wide swath of legislators, says Slating.

Were the bill to be brought up for revision today, who knows? Because of this quirk of legislative history, algae fuel alternatives may just have to wait.

"Study a Broad": Section of Broadsides newsletter that profiles members who are making a difference for wild lands.

]]>No publisher2013/01/21 02:00:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbGreat Old Broads for Wilderness laugh and learnhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.1/great-old-broads-for-wilderness-laugh-and-learn
The pro-wilderness group teaches elders how to engage in public lands management, while having a great time.It's a brilliant Sunday morning in southeast Utah, and a hag mask hangs on the fence before me. Gray hair askew, she gapes at red cliffs through dripping fake blood. The vandal who mounted the mask has also locked the gate to our campsite. No one can get in or out -- a dangerous prospect, since most of the 50 or so folks here are senior citizens.

I'm about to photograph the scene, documenting what to me seems a gruesome tableau, when a voice pipes up: "She's kind of pretty, actually."

"Yeah, she looks wise," adds another.

"Like us!"

"Will you take my picture with her?"

Rose Chilcoat, the rosy-cheeked, energetic 54-year-old associate director of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, mugs next to the mask as I snap away.

I'm startled by the Broads' calm response to this outrageous threat. The mask comes with an ominous note: "Get out of San Juan County. This is your last warning." But Chilcoat, whose group educates elders about public-lands issues in hopes of making them active stewards, seems unfazed.

Later on, in a more serious moment, she muses: "I never thought little old ladies in tennis shoes would be seen as such a threat." But such extreme reactions to their activism have only encouraged Chilcoat and the Broads to hold fast to what might be called an essential tenet of "Broad-ness": Humor is more powerful than fear.

In a roundabout way, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, inspired the creation of the Broads in 1989. New Mexican Susan Tixier and some of her backpacking buddies in their 50s heard how Hatch had argued against wilderness designation, saying that prohibiting motorized access excludes the elderly from the backcountry. "We thought, 'Jeez, we are all old and we still hike!' " recalls Tixier. "So, what better than to have old people, particularly old women, stand up for wilderness?"

"We didn't really want to be 'ladies,' and 'women' seemed like kind of a weak noun," she adds, so Great Old Broads it became. The brash name is a selling point to women of a particular type, notes Chilcoat. Broads enjoy joking as they protest; when they picketed against snowmobiles in Yellowstone, one wore a Winnie the Pooh costume with a sign reading, "I can't 'bear' the noise and pollution." "When you get to a certain age, who cares?" she says.

By 2030, there will be about 30 million more senior citizens in the U.S. than there are now. But their growing numbers aren't the only reason to get them interested in public lands, says Chilcoat. Many are retired and have the time to get involved. And, "There's a certain credibility when elders speak, even in this day and age."

The fast-growing advocacy group has about 4,000 members and has opened 22 chapters, known as Broadbands, across the West and in places as far away as Florida. And while the group is unabashedly pro-wilderness, each Broadband has considerable latitude to choose what it works on. As former executive director Veronica Egan puts it: The Broads are "not anti-anything except poor land management."

Spending time with the group in Colorado and Utah, I met grandmothers who could hold forth in intimate detail on grazing policy and octogenarians who volunteer for the Bureau of Land Management, providing informed critiques of federal land-use plans and studies. How, I wondered, do the Broads transform their members from graying retirees into GPS-wielding, public-comment-making dynamos?----

“We’re almost there,” shouts Liz Thomas. An attorney for the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Thomas leads a group of Broads -- several women and a few men -- over a small rise outside Canyonlands National Park, not far from where the Broads are camped. We're looking for an ATV right of way proposed by San Juan County. "It's not an open trail now," Thomas says. But we find faint treads where an ATV has tracked the route, and begin to follow them.

Along the way, group members kneel to examine native grasses and are surprised to find blooming native flowers in late September. Russian thistle and other invasives, which Thomas showed us earlier at a heavily used off-road area, could swiftly take over if ATV traffic ramps up, Thomas explains. After learning that the BLM is still taking comments, a number of Broads vow to write in.

Later, we come across a trail sign defaced with a sticker reading: "Our land my ass." The Broads gather around, open-mouthed. Then, Broadness takes over and one of the hikers pulls down his pants and moons for a photo, positioning his derriere next to the sticker.

Educational hikes like this one are regular fixtures of the four-day outings known as Broadwalks, held several times a year around the country. At Broadwalks, attendees also help with service projects, including trail construction and fence building, and spend nights around the campfire, listening to speakers and catching up with each other. They leave well-versed in federal land management and ready to engage in public-lands issues.

They also learn, as we just did, how passionately anti-wilderness some folks are. The vandalism came as the Broads joined other wilderness groups in a campaign for a new national monument surrounding Canyonlands, which could limit four-wheeling in sensitive areas, such as the one we hiked through. In 2007, the group's documentation of ATV damage at archaeological sites led to a trail closure to off-roaders in southeast Utah's Recapture Canyon -- and made some enemies in the process. But many Broads also engage in a quieter, more service-oriented activism, supporting often short-staffed government agencies as volunteers.

“So I am looking 300 degrees.” Janice Shepherd glances up from her compass to make a note in a small yellow book. Then, she photographs a spot where ATVs have widened a trail near Grand Junction, Colo., likely causing increased erosion and other damage. With her fanny pack, rucksack and a pouch dangling from her neck, the small, gray-haired woman looks like a dauntless explorer, off to map some distant clime.

It's a chilly winter morning, and Shepherd and Sherry Schenk, who leads the local Broadband, are following one of several BLM routes they monitor for damage like this. Later, Shepherd will enter her photos and notes into a database linked to a map, so the local BLM -- which oversees 1.2 million acres -- knows which trails need repair and can reference photographs of problem areas.

In 2011, Schenk, a retired school psychologist, attended her first Broadwalk and was inspired to lead a Broadband. She attended Bootcamp, a four-day leadership training, where she fumbled with GPS devices, learned online organizing tools and attended workshops on public-lands law. "It was," she laughs, "kind of overwhelming."

Yet Schenk persisted. Her Grand Junction Broadband, which now has about 30 active members, emphasizes volunteering and participating in agency land-management planning. Schenk and Shepherd spend so much time at the BLM office that an employee told me, "When I first started, I thought (Shepherd) worked here."

As the three of us start uphill in the warming air, a mountain biker rattles down the trail, and we leap out of the way. "Hey, Sherry! How's it going, Janice?" he calls. It's Mike Jones' day off, but Jones, who works on trails and recreation for the BLM, stops to chat and answer Shepherd's questions about work the route we're on might need. He agrees with her assessment, noting that if some volunteers could build up the trail's outside edge, the "water would run off of it."

As Jones prepares to wheel away, the Broads mention that I am with them to learn about the group's involvement with public lands.

He nods approvingly.

"Yup, these guys do a lot of work for us. A lot of work. So you got the right ones."

]]>No publisherCommunitiesProfiles2013/01/23 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDesigning for behavior changehttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/designing-for-behavior-change
How the built environment can help us conserveDual flush toilets are, in my opinion, a great water-saving invention. Yet one of my biggest pet peeves is a type of dual flush toilet that I often see in public bathrooms. In this particular design, to use less water, you push the flush handle up; to use more water, you push it down.

Yet most people's typical flushing action, molded by lifelong experience with standard toilet designs, is to push the handle down.

Thus, the majority of flushers, regardless of their environmental sensibilities, will likely miss the fine print or sign above the toilet and use the maximum amount of water by default, even though there is an option to use less water.

I gave this example because it illustrates how important design can be in influencing behavior. Here's another: at a reception, giving attendees conical paper beverage cups means that instead of leaving their cups lying about on surfaces, they'll carry them around or, when finished, dispose of them in a waste basket, since a cone-shaped cup can't be left on a table or windowsill.

A new study out in the journal PLOS ONE offers a glimpse into how the field of psychology could help support designers and engineers trying to influence environmental behavior. In the study, researchers at the University of British Columbia compared student waste disposal actions in two cafeterias. Both cafeterias possessed recycle, compost, and waste bins, but one cafeteria was in a LEED-certified green building, the other in a normal building.

It turns out students in the LEED-certified building cafeteria were better at disposing of their waste in the proper container -- over 15 percent better. The lead author on the paper, David Wu, thinks psychologists, by conducting more experiments to isolate what factors in the LEED building led people to behave differently, could help designers and engineers improve many types of buildings to encourage more environmentally-sound behavior.

I know some of you are thinking that people eating in a green building cafeteria might be self-selecting. But the researchers also determined through interviews that students eating in the LEED certified building were not biased to be pro-environment. That is, they didn't choose to eat in that cafeteria because they care about the environment or studied environmental issues, but primarily because it was in a convenient location, near work or class.

Why did eaters in the green building behave differently, then? In the paper, Wu, a research assistant in psychology at the University of British Columbia, and his co-authors referred to a phenomenon called "embodied cognition effects," which basically means the environment around you affects how you think and act. For example, it's been shown that people who are holding a warm beverage, or who are physically warm, act more warmly towards others. Similarly, certain aspects of a green building may lead people to think -- and act -- more environmentally when throwing out their trash.

"I think one of the things we took away from this research is that the building itself doesn't really need to be sustainable … as long as it is promoting a message that you care and that there is an intent for you to act sustainably," says Wu.

More experiments in this field can help determine what aspects of a "green" building trigger "green" behavior, he says. It could simply be something like changing the color or lighting around recycling stations, or putting up signs that make people think more about how their choices affect the environment. Those things could be done in non-LEED buildings as well.

Of course, the findings aren't just limited to waste disposal. Some design solutions are as simple as changing default temperatures on washing machines so that users must actively choose to use extra energy to heat the water more, while others involve changing how users think about their environment. In the UK, an experiment called CarbonCulture aims to reduce non-domestic building energy use by integrating an energy-focused social network, which includes games encouraging people to use less energy, and with things like live displays showing building energy use so users and facilities managers see what in the building uses a lot of energy, and when. So far, participants in the test building are having a great time -- and reducing their carbon emissions.

In the absence of a national or international plan to reduce carbon emissions, those who care about climate change are looking for other solutions. Psychologists -- and designers -- may offer a way forward.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityBlog Post2013/01/21 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA bridge to nowhere?http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-bridge-to-nowhere
The climate friendliness of natural gas comes into question, againEarly into the new year, researchers measuring methane leaks from natural gas fields in Utah found that far more of the climate-forcing gas was being emitted than they thought (methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat). Preliminary results from that research, in the Uinta Basin, show that 9 percent of the total methane produced there is being leaked to the atmosphere.

To put that percentage into context, in order for natural gas operations (from well to city) to produce less climate impact than the life cycle carbon emissions of a new coal-fired power plant, leakage from natural gas operations needs to be under 3.2 percent. Given that, 9 percent is a little crazy.

"We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see," says Colm Sweeney, part of the research team and a scientist at NOAA's Earth Systems Laboratory in Boulder.

These high leakage numbers (a 4 percent rate was found in a Colorado gas field last year, and a Cornell study last year also called into question natural gas's climate benefits, although the leak measuring methodology has been questioned by other researchers [PDF]) are problematic if natural gas is supposed to be a clean energy bridge to renewables. Models created by the Environmental Defense Fund show that natural gas does have potential to lower carbon emissions significantly, especially if it is part of a switch to a natural gas-renewable mix, but those models assume a 2.8 percent leak rate or lower. Natural gas power plants are also viewed as a key part of switching to renewables, because those plants can come online quickly, relative to coal plants, helping to keep the energy supply constant when used in concert with variable sources like wind and solar.

Another new study looking at methane escapes in cities also brought some bad news, finding that pipelines are leaking in many places. The team, led by Boston University researcher Nathan Phillips, used a cool new piece of monitoring technology from a California-based company, Picarro, that lets researchers mount a methane detector on a car and drive around, finding leaks. The monitor also uses isotope detectors to determine what source the leaks come from, differentiating between pipeline leaks and other sources, like swamps or leaking landfills. The researchers on that study found 3,356 methane leaks coming from fossil fuel sources.

While Phillips says they don't yet know the magnitude of those leaks, he told Andrew Revkin at the Times' Dot Earth blog he expected most were small, but there were likely a few really large ones, which not only waste gas, but also pose an explosion risk.

Another study looking at methane leaks from a number of natural gas fields, led by the University of Texas, Austin and in cooperation with Environmental Defense Fund and many of the nation's largest natural gas producers, is set for completion this month. The size and scope of this study make its results particularly interesting, because it will provide a better sense of leakages in a number of gas fields, versus the more localized studies in Utah and Colorado. Stay tuned.

When such a disaster does happen, oil spill responders are faced with many choices about how to contain the spill and clean it up. In the Deepwater Horizon blowout, BP chose to apply chemical dispersants to break up the oil gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico.

But the fact remains -- as long as we use oil, there will be spills, and we'll need ways to mop them up. This study, however, highlights the fact that the methods used to control oil spills can have their own negative impacts. Many coastal communities are worried that those impacts are understudied and underweighted when companies make decisions about how to respond to spills.

That's why, in 2010, Cook Inletkeeper, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, and other environmental nonprofits, along with Earthjustice, notified the EPA of their intent to sue the agency for its failure to properly evaluate the effects of dispersants, including testing their toxicity in coastal environments.

These communities know that use of dispersants, which break oil up into small droplets, is basically a tradeoff between protecting some animals and some parts of ecosystems versus possibly harming organisms sensitive to dispersants' effects. Bob Shavelson, of Cook Inletkeeper, in Homer, puts it this way: "Industry would prefer (the oil) out of sight and out of mind…they just don't want bad public relations with oiled seals or birds on the front page of the newspaper."

The extent of that tradeoff, though, has not been quantified by the EPA. If it were known, these groups argue, oil spill responders might make different decisions about how to clean up after a disaster.

Dispersants, though understandably popular, aren't always a must-use option. Oil spill responders can plug leaks and use mechanical controls to sweep up spilled oil. They can wait and let oil naturally disperse. A lot of dispersants' effectiveness also depends on environmental conditions, like what type of oil was spilled, the wave height, amount and type of dispersant used, and salt content of the water the oil was spilled in. In some cases, depending on the type of oil spilled and the local ecology, dispersants might not be the best choice.

As Earthjustice attorney Hannah Chang explained to me, the Clean Water Act requires EPA to keep something called a product schedule that lists the chemical dispersants allowed to be used on oil spills. The schedule is also supposed to list the specific waters dispersants can be used in, and the quantity allowed to be used, in hopes of limiting toxic spillover effects like the one in the Gulf. To date, though, the EPA hasn't updated the schedule to do that. So, in August 2012, after waiting for EPA to respond to their notice for two years, the groups filed a formal lawsuit to force the EPA to evaluate the toxicity of these chemicals, in what quantity they should be used, and where they are appropriate.

The lawsuit is still ongoing. On its website, EPA says it plans to release a revised rule that includes evaluation of dispersant effectiveness and toxicity testing this month.

While he waits for the agency to do this, Cook Inletkeeper's Shavelson is nervously watching "a new wave of oil and gas drilling" in his neck of the woods. He hopes the EPA clarifies the potential harms and approved uses of dispersants before there's another spill in Alaska. He also points out, of course, that oil companies, particularly those renewing their efforts to drill in Arctic waters, should be focusing on prevention and safe drilling as a top priority:

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeBlog Post2012/12/10 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMoney and climatehttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/money-and-climate
The economics of carbon captureAh, money. During one of the biggest shopping times of the year, after spending Thanksgiving morning rolling stacks of coins with the kids, my thoughts turn to it, naturally. Or maybe unnaturally; what was mostly on my mind was the high cost of doing something to slow climate change. Specifically, I was thinking about carbon capture.

Carbon capture is just what it sounds like: taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It's a great idea, capturing the CO2 from a coal-fired power plant before it gets into the atmosphere. I always imagine a giant sock-like apparatus on top of a smokestack, billowing and bulging up as carbon dioxide fills it. (Disclaimer: That's not actually how it works.)

Of course, like all great ideas, this one comes with a catch. Whether it's a giant sock or a solvent capturing CO2 from a "slipstream of flue gas," as the Department of Energy describes its new test project, capturing carbon is very, very expensive. That's why the DOE project, part of its Post-Combustion Carbon Capture Center (PC4), is testing out new technologies -- so that industry can have some cost-effective options some day in the future.

"This is because a chief problem of CCS is not its technical feasibility: different industries have been using bits of the technology for years. Combining it on a power plant in a way that makes financial sense is fantastically troublesome, however," FT reports. That's because there's both a big upfront cost and ongoing costs, such as the fact that running a capture facility on the power plant steals away some of the power it is trying to sell.

One possible solution mentioned in the article: instead of big grants to start up a CCS project, a combination of one-time grants and longer term subsidies, such as those given to biofuels, wind, or solar.

This brings me to one of the funny ironies of carbon capture and storage: one of the best places to store CO2 is likely to be just where we found it: the oil fields. In Europe, both Norway and the Netherlands have competing plans to take CO2 from other countries and inject it into reservoirs in the North Sea that once held oil, for both storage and enhanced recovery of the oil and natural gas that remains.

Norway also just opened a $1 billion capture project, the largest such test facility for carbon storage in the world. The Scandinavian country is investing in carbon capture in part because it wants its fossil fuel industries to continue to do well. Basically, it's saying: we want to keep selling oil and natural gas, because they are profitable and make us one of the richest countries in the world, but in our increasingly carbon saturated world, if we're going to do that, we may also need to be responsible for where the carbon dioxide from those resources ultimately ends up.

The United States, recently reported to become one of the biggest oil exporters in the world, is, too.

Stephanie Paige Ogburn is the online editor at High Country News.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeBlog Post2012/11/26 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe future of campaign spendinghttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/the-future-of-campaign-spending
Millionaires who invest locally just might winImagine you're one of the 40,000 people in America with a net worth of over $30 million. That's enough to have some spare cash to play with. Why not use it to influence politics? Come on. You know you want to.

Yet, you're faced with a problem. According to analyses by the Center for Responsive Politics, if you are one of the multi-millionaires who threw your money into national races, you didn't get a very good return on investment. Outside spending in the presidential race skewed widely Republican -- yet Obama won. Republicans put $100 million into seven Senate races that they lost. They outspent Democrats in 24 House races -- that they still lost. (Look at this map on ad spending! It's crazy!)

If I were a political consultant, I'd likely tell those one percenters to slack off on national race spending and pony up at the state level. By funneling their money into ballot measures and initiatives in states, they can have influence all over the country! As heavy political spenders take stock of their expenditures, maybe this is what we'll see more of in the next election cycle -- a think globally, bribe locally sort of thing. Because particularly in ballot initiatives, it seems heavy spending was often able to shift public opinion.

Take California's GMO labeling initiative. As of Oct. 1, public opinion was three to one in favor of labeling. By Oct 11 -- and millions of dollars of opposition later, as Mother Jones food blogger Tom Philpott points out -- opinion was split, and "the proposition's slide toward defeat had begun." The opposition ultimately spent $45.6 million, the proponents $8.7 million.

I was interested in seeing if this pattern held true in many controversial ballot initiatives. So I made a chart, with selected initiatives, spending for or against, and their outcome. I chose marijuana and gay marriage in many states because they are initiatives where the electorate seems to be closely divided or shifting opinion. The other initiatives I include in the chart are included because I've either been following them or the results seemed surprising to me.

Items in green are ones where those who spent the most won. Items in red are ones where those who spent the most lost.

Notably, the spending in Arkansas did shift public opinion, though, just not enough. As of Oct 18, only 38 percent of likely voters supported legalizing medical marijuana. Yet after money poured into the state in support of Issue 5, as it was called, 48.6 percent of the voting public supported the measure on Nov. 6. That's a hefty hike.

The Oregon casino measure is another case in point. A Canadian casino investment group, which would benefit from the casino they would build if the measure passed, poured money into it. But most Oregonians don't like the idea of casinos popping up all over their state. So despite lots of spending on it from the pro side, the measure didn't win.

I'm unsure how to explain the outcome of California's Proposition 34, which would have repealed the death penalty and replaced it with life without parole, but failed. This was despite proponents outspending opponents by an incredible amount, and California's tradition of being a liberal state, where I would imagine most people would oppose the death penalty.

Bottom line: those throwing money into local campaigns seem more likely to be successful, but circumstances do matter. For instance, it seems like spending succeeded more frequently in areas where public opinion is closely split on the topic, or public opinion is relatively uninformed on the topic, and open to messaging, like in California's modified foods labeling proposition.

Some millionaires, obviously, have already caught onto the ballot initiative game. The biggest individual donor to Colorado's marijuana legalization effort was San Francisco-based Internet businessman Scott Banister. (Perhaps he's hoping to toke up legally on his next visit to Aspen?)

It will be interesting to see if money in ballot initiatives, particularly in states like Oregon, that are traditionally low in political spending, changes in the next election.

After all, those millionaires need to put their extra moola into something. Why not your state's ballot initiative?

Stephanie Paige Ogburn is the online editor at High Country News.

]]>No publisherPoliticsBlog Post2012/11/19 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRantcast: Goodbye, listenershttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rantcast-goodbye-listeners
The Rants from the Hill podcast comes to an end.Hi podcast listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Rants from the Hill podcast for the past 6 months. We recently decided to discontinue our podcasts due to staffing limitations at High Country News. But never fear, you can still read the Rants from the Hill online, at HCN.org, on the first Monday of every month. Thanks for tuning in!
]]>No publisherCommunitiesNevadaMultimediaAudio2012/11/05 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWhither wilderness?http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/whither-wilderness
As Congress refuses to create wilderness, conservationists turn to presidential actions to helpOn a stretch of land along the eastern side of Colorado's Arkansas River, enormous, sand-colored rocks pile up on each other, looking as if a giant child had picked up a handful and let them dribble out between her fingers. This rock jumble is overlaid with piñon pine, juniper, and spots of ponderosa. It's land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and one special part of it, a 6,600-acre area nearly devoid of trails, is known as the Browns Canyon Wilderness Study Area.

Democratic Senator Mark Udall is pushing for protections for Browns Canyon. His proposal, which he is taking comments on at his website, would create a national monument, the Arkansas River National Monument. Part or most of the monument, which would cover around 20,000 acres of BLM and National Forest land, would be designated as wilderness -- you can comment at his site on your preferred option.

Udall's push for the monument designation, which he would try to pass through Congress, got me thinking about the surge in recent monument designations and proposed monuments across the West -- and the corresponding lack of wilderness designations.

In southwest Colorado, President Obama just designated Chimney Rock a monument, after an effort to create the monument legislatively, led by Republican Congressman Scott Tipton and Democratic Senator Michael Bennett, failed to pass the Senate.

Last week, Democratic senators Tom Udall and Jeff Bingaman, of New Mexico, asked the president to consider creating two new national monuments in New Mexico with wilderness level protections. The ask came because the senators fear their proposed legislation to declare the areas part wilderness and add them to the National Landscape Conservation System will go nowhere in a stalled Congress.

In Utah, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and others are pushing national monument designation in an area called the Greater Canyonlands, 1.4 million acres of red rock desert surrounding Canyonlands National Park. This move comes after an effort to add wilderness protections to the area, headed in part by former Utah Republican senator Bob Bennett, failed, and Bennett was ousted by a Tea Party opponent.

In 2005, two Colorado Republicans proposed bills to turn the 6,600-acre wilderness study area portion of Brown's Canyon into wilderness, an idea with nearly unanimous local support. (The Arkansas River is one of the most heavily rafted rivers in the world, and local rafting companies were thrilled to add "raft through wilderness" as another attraction.) Yet, because of opposition by the National Rifle Association, that bill died.

In the current political climate, presidential designations as the only way to get wilderness level protections on key landscapes.

Opponents of wilderness often say that enough wilderness has been designated already. And it's true that there was a flurry of designations shortly following the 1964 act, with many National Forest lands and Park Service lands designated as wilderness. But as Arizona State University law professor Joseph Feller, an expert on public lands law, notes, Bureau of Land Management property has largely been left out of wilderness designations, even though the agency does manage landscapes with wilderness qualities. This is in part because the original Wilderness Act did not allow BLM land to be eligible, and, once it was made eligible in 1976, the only significant legislative wilderness designations of BLM land have occurred in Arizona, in 1990 1996, and California, in 1994 1990. Nevada also has significant wilderness acreage on BLM lands, which have been put together through a number of smaller bills, but it still has more areas awaiting designation than it has areas of wilderness, says Feller.

"I think it is fair to say that the BLM wilderness designation process has pretty much stalled," he says.

Let's go back to Brown's Canyon. This Saturday, I hiked out with a group, including the Friends of Brown's Canyon and the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, interested in getting the area designated as wilderness. The landscape was rugged; I envisioned mountain lions tracking prey from atop a rock, and elk descending through from the nearby Buffalo Peaks, in search of winter forage.

While the area had its own craggy beauty, it was not the picture postcard you imagine when someone utters the word "wilderness."

When the 1964 Wilderness Act was passed, those postcard places were the wilderness areas that mostly got designated -- the so-called "rock and ice," high elevation, spectacular alpine locales. Brown's Canyon, like many BLM lands with wilderness potential, is a different sort of wild.

The push for its wilderness designation reflects a different sort of priority, too, one based on a desire by today's conservationists to protect places not just for their beauty, but for, say, the ecological services they provide, as corridors for wildlife. Or, maybe even as a refuge where motorized recreationists -- a user group that barely existed in 1964, but which now dominates many public landscapes -- are prohibited.

Image of Browns Canyon WSA, looking across the Arkansas River Valley toward the Collegiate Peaks, courtesy the author.

This piece was updated to fix incorrect dates and to reflect Nevada's wilderness acreage on BLM land.

]]>No publisherPoliticsBlog Post2012/10/30 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleEndangered razorback sucker discovered in Grand Canyonhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/endangered-razorback-sucker-discovered-in-grand-canyon
Biologists puzzle over what this means for fishOn Oct. 9, biologists electrofishing in Grand Canyon National Park caught a razorback sucker -- the first one seen in the park in 20 years. The endangered fish, known for its distinctive humpback, huge size (up to three feet long!) and long life (40-plus years!) was once common in the Colorado River and its tributaries.

But its population has plummeted since the construction of dams, which lowered water temperatures in the river, and increased predation by exotic species. Journalist Hillary Rosner covered the plight of the fish in her 2010 feature story, “One tough sucker.” (She also won a sweet science writing award for that story -- check it out!)

As Rosner reported, sucker populations are now nearly limited to reservoirs on the Lower Colorado, and its survival depends on re-stocking programs. That's why the discovery of the fish in the Grand Canyon was such a surprise.

Biologists believe the fish swam upstream 50 miles from Nevada’s Lake Mead, and are trying to figure out what the discovery means for the embattled species. “What’s different now, and how do we maintain it?” asked Martha Hahn, science director for Grand Canyon National Park.

Here's what a razorback sucker looks like.

Pretty nifty to find one of these swimming around in the Colorado River, eh?

]]>No publisherWildlifeBlog Post2012/10/29 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRedistricting pains in California and other stateshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.18/redistricting-pains-in-california-and-other-states
Many congressional races are up for grabs in California, thanks to a depoliticized redistricting process and less partisan primary system. Once every 10 years, after each U.S. Census, states must redraw political boundaries to reflect demographic changes, a process called redistricting. Districts must have equal populations and should not dilute minorities' voting powers by splitting their vote. The process can become highly politicized, with parties jockeying to draw favorable districts and keep incumbents in office. Legal challenges to new districts drawn by the Nevada and Colorado legislatures, for instance, went to the states' Supreme Courts last year, where rulings mostly favored maps drawn by Democrats.

In an attempt to depoliticize things, California implemented a new redistricting process after the 2010 Census, creating a 14-member independent commission that excluded politicians and lobbyists.

The new process, coupled with California's new primary system, which advances the top two candidates to the general election regardless of party, means that this year, the state's congressional races may be some of the most competitive nationwide. Consider the contest between two Democratic incumbents, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman. Historically, a large Latino segment of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley was divided in a way that allowed the two to split their vote: Berman, a 30-year veteran, captured District 28, and Sherman, who's served 15 years, controlled District 27. The oddly drawn districts, known as the horseshoe and the stake, effectively kept a Latino candidate from successfully challenging either incumbent.

Now, however, those Latino voters are reunited in the newly drawn District 29, where Democrat Tony Cardenas and Independent David R. Hernandez are facing off. Both Berman and Sherman were drawn into District 30, and are competing in a tight, expensive race.

Independent redistricting commissions are not a cure-all, though. Arizona has one, and last year, Republicans displeased with draft maps that made some of their historically safe seats more competitive attempted to oust the commission's chairwoman. They failed, and the Justice Department approved the new maps in April, although lawsuits challenging them continue.

Living Rivers, a nonprofit environmental group based in Moab that has argued the project will pollute groundwater, challenged DWQ's original approval of the project sans pollution permit. They wanted U.S. Oil Sands to do a full groundwater analysis.

As High Country News' contributing editor Jeremy Miller reported this summer, the state's prodigious bitumen deposits, the largest in the U.S., hold between 12 and 30 billion barrels of oil. In hopes of tapping those fossil fuel riches, the company has been wending its way through the state's permit process. This latest decision is a big win for them.

Curiously, as Miller notes in his piece, the company plans to get the water it will use in the project (tar sands extraction is a water-intensive process) from the groundwater lying deep beneath its project site.

Apparently the groundwater is not to deep to drill into as a water source, but still deep enough to be immune from pollution runoff.

These headlines, splashed across major Western newspapers in recent weeks, and in the influential website Politico and the environmental news site Grist just last week, sound alarming.

As an intrepid High Country News editor covering natural resource issues in the West, I decided to check them out. After all, water anarchy in the West is certainly worth some column-inches, right?

A few clicks told me that the headlines all have one source. His name is James Oliver, and he's the general manager of the Tarrant Regional Water District, in north Texas near Fort Worth. In the past few weeks, Oliver has blanketed major Western papers with versions of this alarmist tale. Here's the back story:

The case went all the way to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. In September of 2011, Texas lost the case in that court, as the 10th Circuit ruled Oklahoma doesn't have to sell them water.

In the meantime, he is out trying to persuade water managers in Western states that the 10th Circuit decision, if let stand as-is, will affect their water compacts.

Here's a quote from his piece in the Denver Post:

Last September, in a case involving Oklahoma and Texas (Tarrant Regional Water District v. Herrmann), the Tenth Circuit reread language in the Red River Compact — a compact among Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas — to mean that water sharing among the signatories was voluntary, not mandatory, begging the question: Why did the states negotiate the complex agreement at all?

…

In short, if the Supreme Court decides not to hear this case, virtually every Western state will have no choice but to engage in what could easily become as many as two dozen massively contentious negotiations on which will turn the futures of numerous metro areas and other communities, as well as industries, agricultural regions and Indian tribes. In our factious contemporary political life, can such far-reaching interstate agreements as our water compacts, arrived at in the more placid periods, be put back together, if the courts pull them apart?

That all sounds pretty alarming. Now to the important question: Is it true?

Rob Harris, an attorney with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, doesn't think so.

"Each compact is a product of extensive negotiations between the states that sign them. And that's not to say that case law with one compact can never be relevant to another one, but I think that the applicability of this case to the Colorado River compact is really limited," he told me on Friday.

I also asked Burke Griggs, a lawyer for the Kansas Department of Agriculture and a water law expert who has watched the case, his opinion. In an e-mail, Griggs wrote that while he did not want to comment on the particulars of the case, he did not "really understand Mr. Oliver’s claim that if the Supreme Court declines to review the case, then all water compacts across the West are in jeopardy."

The case is different from most interstate compact cases, wrote Griggs, because it does not involve the states themselves, but rather sub-units of state government suing each other in federal district court. The lawyer also noted that the only way he sees potential impacts on other western watercompacts is if the Court both accepts the case (it hasn't yet) and issues a holding that applies to other compacts, since, as he wrote, "The Court is always careful to define the applicability of its holdings."

And most importantly, wrote Griggs, “the Supreme Court has made it very clear (in Texas v. New Mexico, concerning the Pecos River Compact) that it will not rewrite the terms of a compact, because to do so would violate the separation of powers."

So what's the reason for Oliver's full court press in the opinion pages?

According to Harris, of Western Resource Advocates, the Texas water district is looking for allies. Oliver's strategy is to get Western water mavens worried enough to take up his cause.

"He's going after again the water districts, states, anybody else that he thinks might be interested in siding with them if the Court picks up the case."

Those groups could file friend of the court briefs on Tarrant's behalf, says Harris.

"But honestly I think he's making a mountain out of a molehill here."

So there you go. Are we on the verge of water anarchy? Probably not.

Stephanie Paige Ogburn is the online editor at High Country News.

This article has been updated to incorporate comments from Burke Griggs.